About Sissy

Sissy Lappin is the #1 trusted voice of the real estate consumer. The founder of Lappin Properties, Sissy runs one of the most successful real estate firms in Houston. With over 28 years of experience, she has marketed over ½ billion on deals all over the country.

She was recognized by the Houston Business Journal as "#1 in most expensive homes sold." Sissy delivers exceptional, one-to-one personal service and she does it all from one desk, with one laptop.

Though highly respected in her industry, Sissy is considered a renegade because she is a one-man-show and not a large firm.

Now Sissy has taken the proven system she used to build her home sales success and is devoted to empowering homeowners around the country to do the same. The reality is the web has made it possible for every homeowner to do the job and do it well. The Simple and Sold process makes it easy for homeowners to price, list, market, and sell their own homes.

A smart man learns from his mistakes. A wise man learns from the mistakes of others.

SISSY’S A-HA MOMENTS!!!

In the past few years I have seen a new type of real estate agent being created; it is stay-at-home moms, doctors, and people from all walks of life. They realize a 6-8% commission to a real estate agent is just too much money to pay. I have received emails from homeowners selling their own homes from postings on Facebook and twitter...and they were successful!

I had a doctor pay his receptionist $1,000 to surf the web on how to sell a home. He had it listed for one year with a real estate agent and it did not sell. He sold it without out an agent in less than 30 days. I had a friend who needed to sell her home fast. It was headed to foreclosure. Something I had been through the humiliation of at an early age. I knew my friend hadn’t meant for her finances get bad. I went to her home and in less than 2 hours, I went over the steps to making a successful home sell. She was now empowered and sold her home. Whatever your reason, I am here to guide you through the process.

Why am I letting the Cat out of the Bag???

When true innovation comes around, there's no stopping it.

Innovation doesn't care about the National Association of Realtors, the fourth-largest lobbying group in America that spends billions of dollars to save the sacred real estate commission. In fact, innovation doesn't care about the real estate commission at all.

Innovation has never cared about its own consequences -- look at the decline of manufacturing and the rise of outsourcing. We embrace innovation every day. When was the last time you went to a bank teller when an ATM was just down the block? Have you stopped consulting a stockbroker, turning instead to E*Trade? Wills and Corporations are now created with websites such as LegalZoom. Taxes are now done on Turbo Tax. These services have fundamentally changed and so has real estate. With the Web, there is an app for anything for things that normally would have taken a middleman to do. What happened in these industries is happening in the real estate industry. The last 5 years have seen a 30% decrease in the number of real estate agents. No other industry has died this fast. Not even travel agents.

The history of the modern world is a history of innovation. It's not always pretty, and it's sometimes painful, but innovation has always ultimately led to new freedoms and greater personal choice. Blindly holding on to the way it has always been done is nothing more than a great way to go out of business.

Right now, innovation is rocking the real estate industry. There was a great old marketing strategy of making it look difficult to sell a home-- but this has been exposed as a lie with websites like Trulia, Zillow and Yahoo!Real Estate. Buyers and sellers see that they can deal directly with each other and save money. Companies like Simple & Sold are smoothing out the process, making it nearly effortless.

Here's a secret for you. When a home is sold, only 2 documents are needed in a majority of deals: A purchase contract and a seller's disclosure. That's it. There are plenty of extra documents you can tack on, but many of these are to indemnify real estate agents should they neglect to do their job correctly.

WHY IT IS MORE EFFECTIVE TO SELL YOUR OWN HOME

Mass marketing vs. Target marketing

Here's another secret. Advertising has changed forever, and mass marketing is dead. We have moved to what I call target marketing. Just look at email. Remember how there was a movie about how exciting it was to get an email? Now we dread how many emails we have in our inbox. Mass emails are spam. Real Estate Firms are clinging on to this with their "NEW LISTING, REDUCED, PRICED TO SELL" emails--they're meaningless and treated like spam.

In a world full of instant but often overwhelming and shallow communication, people are craving connection, and this extends to real estate. Individuals marketing their own home have the capability of giving the process a personal feel. Even in a big city, you feel like you are buying in a small town when you deal directly with an owner. That is the new, functional marketing in the world we live in today. It's all about community, personal connection, and a sense of the unique.

INNOVATION waits for no one; over 90% of buyers find their home on the internet. There are savings to be had!

I am a real estate agent, and I'm here to do something that not too many of my peers would do. I wrote a book and started a company to tell you that small is the new big-- and you are your own new real estate agent.